Season 2 Episode 8: Born to Walk

November 1, 1987

Published 11/01/87

Al fails the written portion of his driving test on the same day Kelly passes hers, which leaves him without a licence, confined to the house, and unable to get to the racetrack for a horse race he has money on. The symmetry is the joke, a man who has been driving for twenty years loses the right to do it on the day his teenage daughter gains it, and the episode spends its length on his increasingly undignified attempts to reach a betting window.

It is a good early example of how the series used Al’s job to define his life. He mentions here that he gets one day off a week, which means the racetrack trip is not a leisure activity so much as his entire allocation of free time, and losing it costs him more than the bet. The arithmetic of the licence also dates him: twenty years of driving in 1987 puts him behind the wheel from around 1967, at eighteen or nineteen.

Two lines here get picked up much later. Kelly tells Marcy she is tired of the “put out or get out” treatment from boys, a phrase she returns to in season seven’s “T-R-A-Something-Something Spells Tramp.” And Al, mid-conversation about taking Steve hunting while making him wear antlers, promises Peggy they will make a day of it, a promise the series finally collected on in season six’s “The Gas Station Show.”

The episode also finds one of the show’s better uses for Kelly. Having passed the test her father failed, she is in a position to drive him where he needs to go, and the negotiation that follows establishes the transactional terms the two of them operated on for the rest of the run. Nobody in this family does anything for free, least of all for each other.